Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland responds to a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday, March 6, 2017.Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Those seem like crazy questions. But Freeland is under a microscope in the wake of efforts by Russian-linked bloggers to tie her to her deceased grandfather’s past as the editor of a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper, published in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Freeland initially dismissed the reports as Russian propaganda. But this week, the Alberta-born minister was under new scrutiny with Canadian papers picking up the story and commentators complaining she’d been less than forthcoming about her family’s troubled past.

Mykhailo Khomiak, or Michael Chomiak, to use his Anglicized name, was Freeland’s grandfather and spent his post-war years in Alberta. Before the war, he was a young journalist in Lviv. Today, it’s a city in western Ukraine. But in the 1920s, it was a part of Poland. Chomiak was a reporter for a Ukrainian-language Lviv newspaper called Dilo, or Deed.

“It was one of the most famous Ukrainian newspapers,” says Ernest Gyidel, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, who is studying this period. “It was quite a high intellectual product. But Chomiak was not an intellectual. He never wrote anything that was like political analysis. He was a journalist who just reported the facts.”

In 1939, the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Russians marched on Poland and split the country between themselves. Lviv fell to the Soviets. Much of the staff of Dilo fled Lviv for Krakow, in the German zone of occupation. There, they were encouraged by the nationalist Ukrainian Central Committee to start a Ukrainian-language paper, the News of Krakow, or Krakivski Visti. The Germans gave them printing presses, confiscated from a Jewish-owned paper. And soon Chomiak found himself named chief editor — even though, says Gyidel, Chomiak protested he didn’t want the job.

“Calling him chief editor is a bit of a misnomer. He managed the technical aspects of the paper — the printing, the type set, the distribution, the logistics. Throughout the whole of the war, he never wrote a single article,” said Gyidel.

As part of his dissertation research, Gyidel is analyzing the paper’s articles. About 25 per cent, he says, were Nazi propaganda — anti-Semitic, but also anti-Polish and anti-Russian.

“The Germans wanted to put the occupied population through a school of hate, so that the Poles and Ukrainians would never unite against them. And of course, they published anti-Semitic articles, as all the press did under German occupation. That was just German policy.”

An anti-Semitic cartoon in the Ukrainian-language newspaper Krakivski Visti, published in Nazi-occupied Krakow, Poland. In many ways, says scholar Ernest Gyidel, the newspaper was a “school of hate.”Bloom, David /
Postmedia

Yet the paper, he argues, also published important articles about culture and language and philosophy.

Nothing he’s found in Chomiak’s letters or articles expressed pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic views. But, he says, Chomiak made the choice to continuing working at the paper, rather than take his chances elsewhere.

“He was in no way an intellectual collaborator. But you could definitely see him as a situational collaborator.”

The Nazis were happy to manipulate Ukrainian nationalists as allies against the Soviets. And plenty of Ukrainian nationalists, who loathed Stalin, were happy to collaborate on the false assumption that co-operating with Hitler would somehow win them their own country.

From the vantage point of Canada in 2017, it’s easy to condemn Chomiak’s choices. In a war zone, squeezed between Hitler and Stalin, things weren’t so simple.

Michael Chomiak, Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather, was chief editor of this Ukrainian nationalist newspaper, published during the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Poland.Bloom, David /
Postmedia

Newspaper editors working under oppressive regimes always navigate moral murk, trying to publish newspapers that serve their audiences without ending up in jail, or worse.

Chomiak may have been naive. Or a coward. Or an amoral pragmatist, more interested in protecting himself and his family than in heroism. He may even have been, as some in his family have suggested (albeit without much evidence), a secret part of the anti-Nazi resistance, printing false papers for the Polish underground. Just labelling him a collaborator oversimplifies a horrifically complicated time. But it certainly suits Vladimir Putin and his allies now to insinuate that Freeland’s credibility is tainted by her grandfather’s past.

“There’s always an element of truth in Russian propaganda,” says David Marples, a professor of Russian and Ukrainian history at the University of Alberta. “It’s never an outright lie. But this is a sign that Russia has now interfered in our affairs. And it’s an ominous sign that they’ve delved so deeply into the background of a senior Canadian leader.”

And that’s particularly worrying in light of the way Putin’s propagandists were able to manipulate the news cycle of the last American election.

Naturally, Freeland’s proud of the grandfather she loved, who became a leader in Edmonton’s post-war Ukrainian community. Still, she might have been clearer about his complicated legacy — if only to deny the Russians the ammunition of such Kompromat.

But Chomiak isn’t our foreign minister. Freeland is. And she’s smart, articulate and a potent critic of Putin, so potent she’s banned from Russia. Let’s judge her on her merit — not what her grandfather did, or didn’t, do.

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